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It’s the last week of work before our trip to Spain. It will be an adventure – train to London, then Paris on Eurostar and then the TGV to Barcelona (threatened Spanish rail strikes permitting!). Hopefully Sitges, our eventual destination, will prove to be as delightful and enjoyable as it was on our first visit last September.
Strolling by the sea in Sitges, September 2018

We’ll be away for over three weeks – the longest holiday either husband Michael or I have ever had. In my case, though, it will not be all holiday: I shall still be writing fiction, and my hope is that I will finish my latest novel whilst we’re there.

There would be a certain symmetry in that, since I started writing this same book last autumn during our first visit. I certainly hope to rediscover the fluency I felt during those few days (1,000 to 2,000 words in a couple of hours), as well has having more mental energy to devote to the enterprise. Since Christmas, non-fiction writing on my book Understanding Buses and our latest Monitor report, Bus Industry Performance 2018, has taken a lot of time and energy. As a result, progress on the new novel has slowed.

Mind you, the delay is also partly due to the length of the book. It will definitely be longer than the other three – in fact, at over 74,000 words so far, it has already exceeded the word count of The Stamp of Nature. At just over 72,000 words, that has been my longest to date. Given where I am in the plot of the new one, it seems quite likely that the new one will end up at somewhere around 100,000.

The book is called Governing Passions and will be the second in my series Love in a Changing Climate. Luke Carter is a consultant at Pearson Frazer, the environmental consultancy firm we met in the first volume in the series, A Year of Awakening. A successful member of the team, Luke is offered promotion by his boss Steve Frazer at the start of the book, and becomes an associate director .

His personal life is less satisfactory, though: he’s an out and proud gay man, but is not in a relationship and has not sought one so far. However, attending Steve and Josh’s wedding has him thinking. He fell for somebody at University fifteen years ago, but the friendship they had was abruptly broken off by the other guy, Dan Forrester. Luke has never really got over this, and it doesn’t help that Dan is constantly in the public eye, first as a journalist and recently as a Member of Parliament.

When Dan is appointed as a junior minister at DECRA, the government department for which Pearson Frazer works on a major contract, it becomes highly likely, if not inevitable, that Luke will bump into Dan again. When they do come face to face, the reconnection sparks a chain of events that will change their lives for ever.

Faced with the agonies of a government and political party in turmoil over Brexit, with divisions growing deeper and more bitter, Dan is forced to question everything that has been settled in his life for the last fifteen years: his achievements, his sexuality and his ambitions. He is faced with a decision about how he wishes to spend the rest of his life. Meanwhile, Luke, who is an intensely private man, has to face up to the exposure in the media and on the internet that any relationship with a leading politician will inevitably bring.

I am really enjoying writing about these two characters, as well as meeting up again with Steve, Josh, Barbara and Andy whom we first met in A Year of Awakening. I’ve also rather fallen for another character that we meet for the first time in Governing Passions: Jeremy, who works as Dan’s private secretary – I think we might just be meeting him again in a future book. But we’ll see – enough of plotting new books, I’ve got to finish this one first!

Time to close this, then and get on with the packing and other preparations. Hopefully I’ll get time to record some impressions of the trip as they happen.